Our Victorian Garden

The way we garden today owes a lot to the Victorians. As industrialisation expanded towns and cities, gardens became cherished places of beauty and retreat for ordinary people. The period benefited from new tools, improved transport and cheaper glass, all of which made gardening more ambitious and widely accessible. A lively trade in seed packets developed, both flowers and vegetables, ordered by post from specialised catalogues.

The layers underneath Christchurch Garden are Victorian, to which the pieces of Victorian pottery, glass and coins that Fiona, Sheila and Patrick found when they first landscaped the plot, all testify. The map of the area from 1893 suggests it may have been the site of the school’s midden!

Tucked away in the South corner of our garden, the borders are edged with moulded tiles, called barley twist, which was very popular with the Victorians, who liked their gardens carefully planned, with neat lawns, gravel paths, symmetrical flowerbeds and decorative features such as fountains, statues and cast-iron seating. I’m still hoping for a stone nymph or one of the three Graces to find her way to us!

Our beds are a bright mixture of hellebores, hyacinths, daffodils, roses, dahlias, poppies, and other native plants. Victorian gardeners also enthusiastically introduced exotic and tropical plants from all over the world, cultivated in greenhouses. They loved this mixture of precision, colour and novelty which gave Victorian gardens their rich and ornamental character. Our garden also has many plants whose origins lie in far-off lands. We are especially proud of our Chinese Windmill Palm, Trachycarpus fortunei, originally introduced to Kew Gardens and Prince Albert by Robert Fortune in 1849 from seeds he smuggled from Zhoushan Island, China, back to England. Our palm sits at the nexus between our Victorian garden and the main garden. It was rescued from its original home on the nearby banks of the river Thames and donated to us in 2019.

In 1861 Queen Victoria granted a Royal Charter to the Horticultural Society, an accolade for gardens and gardeners.

The Victorians believed a garden should be both a work of art and a place of enjoyment. And so do we.

Susan Doering

Our garden in 1893. Note the houses (Stanley Terrace) which are long gone but we keep digging up their foundations! Reproduced with the permission of the National Library of Scotland. Link to website: https://maps.nls.uk/view/101202465

Our beautiful climbing red rose outside the gate into our Victorian garden area

Abundant white shrub roses saved from the skip by a volunteer in 2019

Our little Victorian corner of peace and tranquility

A cornucopia of roses!

Chinese Windmill Palm (Trachycarpus fortunei) looking majestic on the bottom left.